


View From The Watchtower

by SleepyDragon19



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-20
Updated: 2014-08-23
Packaged: 2018-02-13 23:29:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2169414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SleepyDragon19/pseuds/SleepyDragon19
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If Sherlock was obsessive, possessive and ruthlessly intelligent with the boredom threshold of a small child with attention deficit disorder Mycroft was something much, much worse; he was a devoted big brother with the same tendencies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_There is nothing to winning, really. That is, if you happen to be blessed with a keen eye, an agile mind, and no scruples whatsoever. – Alfred Hitchcock_

 

Mycroft Holmes is eight and three quarters when he is first presented with a mewling, red faced new born and informed that he has a new baby brother.

It wasn’t love at first sight. The baby was loud, smelly and constantly bad tempered. He didn’t sleep through the night, he wouldn’t settle to the routine baby books advocated and he seemed to have a peculiar fascination with pulling Mycroft’s hair. To this day Mycroft maintains this was responsible for his receding hair line – it was running away in self-defence from pudgy little hands and hasn’t bothered to stop since.

For the first eighteen months of his life Sherlock was cross, colicky and sickly. If there was a virus within a ten mile radius then his baby brother would contract it – even if he was kept in a completely sterile room with no contact with the outside world.

Their parents worried, constantly, about their youngest son. “He was born too early” his father would say, a worried frown creasing his forehead, as he tried to quiet the once again ill baby. “Weight gain can be a problem with premature babies” his mother would soothe, “his immune system will pick up once he’s weaned and he’s getting better nourishment”.

But it didn’t.

When Sherlock was two he was rushed to hospital with a severe dehydration. His brother, even as a toddler, had had a peculiar relationship with the necessities of life and unless physically watched and reminded was prone to forgetting that he needed to eat and drink. It was the July after Sherlock’s second birthday when their parents went away overnight for the first time since his brother was born. The cause of the problem was simple enough, it was the height of summer and the nanny had forgotten to make him drink for the two days his parents had been away at his mother’s physics conference. Mycroft, now nearly eleven, had sat in the waiting room of Saint Jude’s hospital for three hours while the doctors tried to save Sherlock’s life. His kidneys were compromised, they were told, from being born two months premature and the dehydration had sent him into renal failure. It would be two fraught weeks before the Holmes family was able to leave the paediatric ward and return home.

The nanny didn’t return with them. Instead their mother left her job with CERN and stayed at home to look after Sherlock. Mycroft took to researching all the causes and signs of renal failure and started sleeping in his brother’s room to monitor his breathing.

At three people were starting to make comments about his little brother. Sherlock walked at ten months of age. He hadn’t bothered crawling, just watched the people around him and then one day got up and started walking as if he had always been doing it. It was the same pattern with his toys, he would watch how other people used them and then methodically try to copy. His parent’s had assumed that talking would be the same when it became apparent that Sherlock had no intention of babbling or attempting verbal communication. “He’ll talk in his own time” their father had said defensively at one of Sherlock’s many routine check-ups. But when his third birthday came and went and there was still no sign of him talking people started muttering words like “Autism” and “Asperger’s” when they thought they wouldn’t be heard. But Mycroft heard them and understood that these people thought that there was something wrong, something deficient with his baby brother; and it made him furious – his brother didn’t need to speak, Mycroft understood him and that was all he needed.

Sherlock was taken for assessment after assessment with little result; all the specialists could tell their increasingly worried parents was that there was nothing physically preventing their youngest child from speaking and it was, therefore, likely something psychological.

Nothing changed for months until one day when Mycroft had taken Sherlock to play in the local park and he met a red setter by the name of Monty and Sherlock just started talking about everything and everyone. The doctors couldn’t understand it, by Mycroft did; the world was too big, too confusing and people were idiots. Sherlock hadn’t understood how things fit together until he met this dog and then he did.

For his fourth birthday their parents bought Sherlock a red setter puppy. Sherlock called him Red Beard after his favourite pirate.

Everyone thought that things would get easier once Sherlock started talking.

They didn’t.

People were stupid. This was a fact of life Mycroft had understood and accepted from a very early age. Sherlock couldn’t understand why no one other than his big brother and mother could understand what he saw so clearly, why people didn’t understand and make the same intuitive leaps of logic he made. It made him easily frustrated and with that emotion came a large side serving of boredom. Nursery didn’t challenge him, socialising didn’t interest him and if not carefully watched his brother had an unparalleled ability to make mischief and get into trouble.

Their father tried to connect with his youngest son with little success. Mycroft and their mother had more but it was fraught with difficulty.

Mycroft at fourteen was now attending Eton and starting to cultivate the contacts he would need for when he went into government. This meant he had far less time to spend with his bored and lonely little brother and was now away for most of the year. He wrote letters to Sherlock and spoke to him on Sundays for half an hour but for all that Sherlock was intellectually brilliant his emotional maturity was equally stunted. Sherlock couldn’t understand why his brother had abandoned him, why he couldn’t visit more, why he would want to spend his holidays vacationing with future politicians, the sons of industrial magnates and Sheiks from far off countries.

Had Mycroft understood the true extent of Sherlock’s emotional isolation or comprehended the future consequences of his absence during this formative period of his brother’s life he would have delayed his political ambitions and been home like a shot.

But he hadn’t, and he wasn’t and that was a regret that would last a lifetime.

Sherlock was alone, but more than that he was lonely. His brain was developing too quickly in comparison to other aspects of growing up. It set him apart from his peers and made him a target for ridicule and cruelty. It didn’t help that Sherlock also appeared to lack any sort of filter between brain and mouth.

Where Mycroft had learnt early on to conceal the true extent of his intelligence so as to manipulate the people around him into suiting his plans, Sherlock was incapable of such disguise. The more his peers ostracized him the more vitriolic and defensive Sherlock became.

At eight years old Red Beard died. It was the first crime Sherlock ever solved.

Several of the boys from Sherlock’s school had taken the dog from his parent’s back garden and used him for target practice with a shotgun they had borrowed from Tony Miller’s study where it had been left loaded and unattended while he answered the phone.

Sherlock was distraught when he found his beloved dog three days later. It took him an additional two days to put together the crime. His father would later tell Mycroft that they should have seen the warning signs, should have realised what the silence meant; a quiet Sherlock always meant trouble.

A week later Sherlock enacted his revenge. He blew up the bicycle shed where these boys like to hang around boasting about their pranks. 

The three boys and two tag-a-longs who had been in the shed at the time suffered second degree burns and one of them lost an eye. It was brutal, brilliant and it was retribution at its finest.

The school couldn’t prove it was Sherlock but that didn’t stop them from calling in a child psychologist. The psychologist started using words like ‘sociopath’, ‘low emotional response’, ‘abnormal’, ‘dangerous’.

Mycroft read about sociopaths and thought that the psychologist had diagnosed the wrong brother. 

Sherlock wasn’t a sociopath, he couldn’t be, not when he had loved Red Beard so completely. The psychologist thought his refusal to express guilt over the bicycle shed incident was evidence that he couldn’t feel guilt – not that this was justice at its most fundamental layer and therefore not subject to guilt.

Angry over the pain they had caused his brother the now twenty year old Mycroft called in some debts he was owed from his school days. The ring leader’s father, Tony Miller, dropped the charges against Sherlock the following day and signed a letter confessing that his son had taken his gun and used it to torture and kill the red setter. 

Mycroft returned to university wiser. There were many bullies in the world, and such individuals only responded to strength; to protect Sherlock from them he would become the biggest of them all.

Before leaving, Mycroft pressed a copy of Machiavelli’s the Little Prince into his brother’s hand with the caution that to care was to invite injury; if one didn’t feel then one’s enemies couldn’t use it against you. It was meant to be a warning against emotional weakness but Sherlock would do one better, he would internalised the name people kept calling him and make it his own. It would become the label Sherlock used to identify himself with in the future; his shield against the unremitting, relentless battering his social confidence would take for the next twenty years as he fought over and over again to prove his intelligence and worth to people so far beneath him in both.

 

His parents were worried; Sherlock was even more quiet and withdrawn than before. They offered to buy him a new puppy, a new companion, but Sherlock refused; Red Beard was a weakness he could no longer afford to have.

Academically Sherlock was brilliant, so much so that his school moved him ahead by two years, they thought the increased challenges would help manage his rapacious curiosity and boredom levels. It didn’t. Sherlock was not accepted, his peers mocked and feared him in equal measure, and his elevation to the upper years only widened the gap further as it became obvious that Sherlock Holmes was one of those incredibly rare things, a genuine genius. Sherlock started skipping school so their parents transferred him to a private establishment that specialised in educating gifted children in the hope that being around people more like him might encourage him to socialise.

But the label of sociopath followed him; haunting his transition from high school to sixth form to university and dogging his footsteps as he tried to fit into a world that was totally alien to him. It should not have come as a surprise that Sherlock discovered the escape offered by chemical substances, nor that he took to it with such abandon; but it did and it was heart breaking for the whole Holmes family.

Sitting by the bedside of his twenty-five year old brother Mycroft vowed this would not happen again; he would not allow it. Sherlock had been missing for three weeks before Mycroft had become aware that his brother was not where he should be. It was a concerned Detective Sargent Lestrade who had rung his office wanting to know if he could talk to the brother of Sherlock Holmes who had finally, after a week of frantic searching, informed a relieved Mycroft Holmes where his little brother was. An hour later found the man who would become the British Government sitting beside his feverish brother as the doctors explained the catalogue of problems they were trying to treat. Sherlock had acute pneumonia in addition to minor frostbite, a stomach infection and an addiction to intravenous cocaine.

Sherlock had been found by this DS Lestrade near Fleet Street, beaten and bloody, in an ally in the midst of winter. He had been living on the streets for the past few weeks after his landlord kicked him out for dissecting road kill in his kitchen. They thought it was a robbery gone wrong, Lestrade told Mycroft, but they had no leads and Sherlock hadn’t been lucid since giving them the number the DS had called Mycroft on.

Mycroft was annoyed. He went and talked to the landlord, the man would leave England two weeks later never to return. He marshalled his resources and tapped into the CCTV network; three days of intense scrutiny by a dedicated sub-team and they had the two men who had hurt his brother – caught on camera as they followed, injured and mocked an ill looking Sherlock who was simply walking down the street at the wrong time.

Lestrade was amazed when three burly security men in uniform black suits deposited the two men in question in the reception of New Scotland Yard for the attention of DS Lestrade.

Things seemed to improve. Mycroft sent his brother to an exclusive (read expensive) rehabilitation clinic to see him through his recovery. Sherlock came back healthier, speaking fluent French, Russian and Bulgarian (which he had picked up from his doctors) and playing the violin. Mummy bought him a Stradivarius to celebrate his return to London and Mycroft increased the surveillance on his brother; he would not allow another situation to develop where his department misplaced his little brother.

Sherlock chaffed at the restriction and the friction in their relationship became increasingly vitriolic as Mycroft refused to stop meddling in his brother’s affairs. Infrequent calls became even less common and Sherlock learnt how to navigate London while avoiding his brother’s surveillance. Mycroft wasn’t concerned, however, their apparent distance was politically useful as it discouraged people from thinking they could use Sherlock against his ever more powerful sibling and it was mostly for show; had his brother truly wished to distance himself, he would not be playing hide and seek with his surveillance team and then taunting Mycroft about his success.

Lestrade turned out to be an invaluable contact for Sherlock as his brother re-discovered his love of problem solving. Assisting the police to solve crimes was a far better use for his time and energies and seemed, miracle of all miracles, to keep his brain sufficiently occupied that drugs became a thing of his past.

It took only a very little bit of string pulling and gentle nudging to have the Commissioner of the Metropolitan police agree to allow Sherlock access to crime scenes and assist with any cases he deemed sufficiently interesting. Lestrade was made his official handler as he was one of the few police officers who seemed firstly, to recognise his brother’s genius and secondly, to work with him on a frequent basis. It helped that due to Sherlock’s involvement in certain key cases Detective Sargent Lestrade received a significant promotion to the dizzying heights of Detective Inspector several years before he would otherwise have done.

And so it continued for several years. Sherlock solving puzzles all over the world, assisting Lestrade as necessary and enjoying his openly contemptuous rapport with Lestrade’s DS and forensics expert.

Whether or not Sherlock actually was a sociopath was now irrelevant in the face of his brother embracing the diagnosis and Mycroft was relieved. Sherlock might not be happy, but he was safe and he was able to do the work he loved and so Mycroft maintained the distance his little brother desired and watched him from afar content that nothing could touch him that Mycroft couldn’t save him from if need be.

Until he met the crippled, recently discharged, Captain John Watson that is. Then everything started to fall apart.  


	2. Chapter 2

When John Watson had first met his little brother Mycroft had assumed that their interaction would follow the established pattern of all previous encounters: Sherlock would take one look at them, say something true in his usual tactless way and watch the fireworks erupt as the individual involved reacted to this affront to their privacy and pride.

 It didn’t.

Sherlock was abrasive, dismissive and rude and John Watson called him ‘amazing’. Sherlock showed the Metropolitan police up for the idiots they are and the doctor said ‘brilliant’. Sherlock ran off with a homicidal cab driver to play his version of suicide roulette and the former officer followed him and shot the murderer to save the life of a man he had only known for two days.

John Watson refused to be bribed, refused to be threatened and refused to be warned away from Sherlock Holmes.

He was an oddity; and Mycroft Holmes did not care for oddities. They tended to be stubborn and difficult to control.

He had said at the time that John Watson would either be the making of his brother or make him worse than ever. This would prove to be the one occasion when he wished his prediction had been wrong because Sherlock had imprinted on his flatmate like a duckling and all the carefully honed distance, all the protection emotional isolation offered to the Holmes siblings started to evaporate.

Magnussen had seen it, had understood it, with the innate sense that only the professional blackmailer has; Mycroft Holmes had only one weakness and that is his little brother. Before John Watson Sherlock had been impenetrable, a bastion of unpredictable, wilful, unassailable strength; he couldn’t be used as a tool to manipulate his brother because he didn’t care about anything enough for it to be used as leverage against him. But then Moriarty showed the world just how much Sherlock cared for his flatmate and all the sharks swimming in the political pond had scented blood.

Sherlock came back from his quest to destroy Moriarty’s empire bruised, battered, emotionally vulnerable and needing John Watson in a way he hadn’t before his ‘death’.  

All might have returned to normal, or at least limped on in some approximation of it, if not for John’s new fiancée, Mary Morstan.   

There was something wrong with Miss Morstan, they had both seen it almost immediately, but Sherlock, desperate to repair his friendship with John Watson, had pushed the mystery that was Miss Morstan ruthlessly aside and did his best to fill any gap available in his friend’s life that he could.

It was embarrassing really the extent to which Sherlock would go for even the smallest scrap of attention from this bumbling buffoon of a doctor. If Jim Moriarty was still alive to appreciate it he would, no doubt, have been ecstatic to see the damage his little fairy tale had wrought. He had succeeded in making his brother fall, even if it was not quite how the deranged Irishman had originally envisioned it.  And fallen far, his brother certainly had. Mycroft had always tried to protect Sherlock anyway he could but he was powerless to protect his baby brother against a broken heart. He had watched, helpless, as his brother prostrated himself before the doctor; desperate for any place, any acknowledgement from the man he had been willing to die to protect. Mycroft, the Ice Man, had come dangerously close to hating John Watson in those months after Sherlock’s return as his brother accepted the anger, the blame, the resentment and the intrusion of a fiancée – even going so far as to plan their wedding for them; a wedding in which he was replaced by a smiling blond and unexpected baby.

Mycroft had reminded him during that dreadful affair with Irene Adler that all hearts are broken if you allow yourself to care; he had thought then that the danger had lain with Sherlock’s fascination with the dominatrix, but he had been blind to the much greater danger that was living in Baker Street, and for that he would never forgive himself.

It had taken Jim Moriarty threatening his brother’s flatmate for a second time for Mycroft to truly comprehend the dangerous co-dependent relationship that had formed between the two men or the powerful nature of the heart that the doctor had awoken.

If John Watson was Doctor Frankenstein then Sherlock’s heart was his monster. Possessive, puerile, fiercely protective Sherlock loved like a child and reacted as such when the people that were _his_ were threatened. The CIA operative was fortunate to escape from his brother’s home with only five cracked ribs and a dislocated shoulder for the comparatively minor crime of thinking to use Mrs Hudson as leverage. The vengeance he had wreaked upon Jim Moriarty for threatening John Watson again had been swift, meticulous and complete. It was a monster the doctor had chosen to walk away from, leaving his creation confused, overwhelmed and alone.

John Watson was a weakness that Sherlock couldn’t afford to have in the shady battlefield of London’s criminal underground, the Achilles heel that had already, and would doubtless be again, his undoing. But Mycroft would be damned before he let Sherlock go without a fight. If keeping one ordinary doctor safe was the price he had to pay to protect his little brother then he would pay it gladly.

So he watched and waited. Miss Morstan would reveal her true colours sooner or later and he would deal with the fallout when she did. What Mycroft had not anticipated was how she would show them; if he had she would have met with a tragic accident while crossing the road one day long before she thought to turn her gun on _his_ baby brother.

 

 

The call came in at 11:52pm on an otherwise normal day. Sherlock had been shot at point blank range and was currently in transit to St Bart’s hospital. It took less than a minute to re-route the ambulance to the Imperial instead, scramble a helicopter, summon his brother’s security detail and arrange for the most senior cardio-thoracic surgeons in the London area to be rushed to the most advanced operating theatre at the Imperial to await his brother’s arrival.

Thirteen hours of hell he waited in a private waiting room while John Watson, covered in bright red blood, shook and paced with nervous agitation. Thirteen hourly updates from increasingly frazzled hospital staff as Sherlock flat-lined four times during surgery. One hundred and twenty-six text-messages from Detective Inspector Lestrade updating him on the investigation into the shooting at Magnussen’s office. Two hundred and eleven missed calls from various diplomats and politicians needing his advice and seven messages left on his parent’s answer phone telling them that there was an emergency and a car would be with them as soon as they returned his call.

John Watson was falling apart. Mrs Hudson was crying. Lestrade was marshalling all the resources he could at Scotland Yard.

And Mycroft? Mycroft was furious.

Someone had shot his baby brother.

Someone had shot his baby brother in the chest and left him to bleed out on the floor before walking away.

Mycroft wanted their head on a platter and he wanted it now!

If Sherlock was obsessive, possessive and ruthlessly intelligent with the boredom threshold of a small child with attention deficit disorder Mycroft was something much, much worse; he was a devoted big brother with the same tendencies.

When Moriarty had threatened Sherlock’s family, his brother had destroyed the man’s criminal empire. Mycroft was going to turn the world upside-down to find the person responsible for this and then he was going to demonstrate to them, and everyone else, just what an insanely bad idea it is to harm the British Government’s little brother. 

**Author's Note:**

> Hiya, 
> 
> Another plot bunny that had to be written. I will get around to finishing off the A-Z of Revenge at some point soon, I swear - it might even turn into a three parter.


End file.
